Summer "Thesis" Work (This is a really long post.)

Anytime I describe my senior project / thesis hopeful to someone, their response is usually:

a.) Woah that's a really cool project.
b.) Woah that's a hell of a lot of work / a big question to try to answer.
c.) A, followed by B.

This reaction is totally valid. And that is why "thesis" is in big bold ambiguous quotations.

My thesis project began when I took African American Literature I & II courses with my favorite (& recently retired! Woo!) professor at Mount Holyoke. In the latter of the courses I became enamored with writing from The Harlem Renaissance, which came as no surprise because this was the unit in which we read the most poetry. But I was confused. When we read men, (Of the Harlem Ren.) we read their poetry. But when we read women, we read their prose. Sure, my class read some poetry (because my professor is the best) but there was so much poetry by men and a significantly lesser amount of women's poetry. What's up with that? I knew there was more to the story than the familiar ratio of men's writing and readership to women's.

So I spent the following semester working with this same fabulous professor to answer this question and investigate the writing of women of the Harlem Renaissance. What I discovered was that the women of this time were writing love poetry. Furthermore, they were oftentimes reinventing techniques used by British Romantic poets. This poetry was considered not radical enough, not political enough. I was stunned to discover this. These love poems were lesbian, they were auto-erotic, they celebrated african american identity using European writing techniques. They were so subversive because they explored love, desire, and vulnerability.

For a while I struggled with whether I wanted to write a thesis exploring this topic analytically or whether I wanted to write a creative thesis, as I had originally been planning. After feeling like I was being pulled in two different directions, I realized that I wanted to combine the two. Using the research I had done in my Independent Study, I aim to write a collection of poems that explore the concept of love poetry as political. I learn best by writing through concepts, and that is what I plan to do with my thesis. In my poems I will explore love within kinship structures, love as sexual desire, and love as an emotional landscape to explore the political and the personal.

While I am in Florida I am writing a poem a week and working on / revising it throughout that week, dedicating each week to "sitting with" a poem. I'm journaling each week about each poem specifically and about general thoughts I am finding myself revisiting. I'm reading a lot of poetry to try to better conceptualize the ways that other poets have written about love and the political / personal. I'm also reading a lot of gender theory. Weirdly enough I'm finding that gender theory has been the most inspirational for my poetry writing. This semester I wrote a passel of four poems for a final exclusively responding to Hélène Cixous' "The Laugh of the Medusa." 

One big leap I've made since arriving here and beginning to write is defining the political, for the purpose of my project. I'm hoping a lot of my summer work will be narrowing down, because this project could use a lot of that. As far as my project is concerned, I'm intending political to mean two things. One: specific to a group or institution. Two: subversive.  I'm interested in writing poems that try to understand femininity, motherhood, female sexuality, and desire. In attempting to define the political aspect of my project, I am confronted with defining the 'personal'. Obviously pairing the personal and political rings some 1960's & 1970's feminist bells, and this is super interesting to me. Second wave feminism has a lot of problematic aspects to it, for sure. But this particular phrase, "The Personal is Political" has been useful beyond this era of White-centric Feminism. In Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color Kimberlé Crenshaw writes,  "This process of recognizing as social and systemic what was formerly perceived as isolated and individual has also characterized the identity politics of African Americans, other people of color, and gays and lesbians, among others." 

The pairing of "The Personal" and "The Politcal" has its own entangled history, but it itself stands for a lot of what my poetry hopes to parce through: the politics of identity especially in love and the way that love, an interactive emotion, employs a panoply of personals -- becoming political in and of itself. The subversive recycling of the phrase "The personal is political," further exemplifies the ways that this dichotomy is much more blurred than we tend to think and I want to investigate this in love poetry.

There is much more to be said and much more to be thought through, but this post is long enough. So I will end with last week's poem: "When I am We" (Before writing this poem I had been reading Luce Irigaray's "The Sex Which is Not One" and thinking about the multiplicity of selves)

When I am we

I see the bits of green in the shadows beside your nose

streaks of algae softly lining the darkness of you

a lake I stand knee deep in,

my feet lost somewhere-under, unseen.

And I turn, without movement

to the sweat that boils off your lip

steam rising from pavement when it finally rains

power washing imaginaries from chalked pavement.

When I am this multiplicity,

you can’t split the difference,

the sameness. These we’s echo like a word

you’ve heard some too many times, somewhere-under.

Best,

M